Benjamin GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | 2025 Truth Endures©

---

The Man Who Wrote Liberace a Speeding Ticket

When I was young, I had the privilege of working alongside some genuinely seasoned police officers. These were men who had been in the profession for decades. They carried with them a wealth of stories and experience. One of the most unforgettable among them was my Captain, Loyd “Bick” Bickerstaff.

Captain Bickerstaff was the first person I met when I interviewed for the job. He pulled for me to get hired, though I never quite knew why. Maybe he saw himself in me. He was around sixty when we met. At the time, I didn’t know much about his background. I quickly learned through stories from others that he was a legend in Oklahoma law enforcement.

Officers came from various places. If they stopped by our agency, they either knew Bickerstaff or had heard of him. He had that reputation. And if he happened to be off-duty during their visit, they left visibly disappointed.

I remember one particular day when I was on desk duty. A reporter from Time-Life came in. He said he was working on a piece about Route 66. He asked if he could interview Captain Bickerstaff. I told him to wait while I went to get the Captain.

Now, Bick wasn’t the type to jump at the chance to talk to the press—unless he had something to say. But when I mentioned a Time-Life reporter was here to see him, he promptly came out into the booking lobby and, in classic Bick fashion, boomed:

“I bet you want to ask me about that son of a bitch I wrote a ticket to back in the 1950s!”

At that moment, I thought, Well, this will be a PR nightmare. But to my surprise, he and the reporter hit it off. They wandered around the station talking and laughing. They even went outside. The photographer snapped pictures of Bick behind the wheel of a patrol car.

Maybe this won’t turn out so bad after all, I thought.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder. What kind of ticket did someone get back in the ’50s? It still had reporters chasing the story.

When Bick returned, he shook the reporter’s hand, sent him off, and then strolled back to where I was working.

“I can tell your brain’s buzzing,” he said with a grin. “You want to know what that was all about?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I’d say so. Stuff like this doesn’t happen every day.”

And so he told me.

In the 1950s, Bick was a trooper with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. In those early days, he patrolled on a motorcycle. One night, near Elk City, Oklahoma, a flashy car with California plates sped by him on Old 66. It was doing over 75 miles per hour or more.

He took off after it and got the car pulled over. It was late, and as he walked up to the driver’s window, the man inside said:

“Surely, you’re not going to write me a ticket. Don’t you know who I am?”

To which Bick famously replied:

“I don’t care if you’re Liberace—you’re driving like a bat out of hell. Yes, I’m writing you a ticket!”

And as it turned out, it was a Liberace. Liberace’s Brother George!

Bick wrote the ticket anyway. George Liberace followed Bick to the courthouse, paid it on the spot, and went on his way.

A few weeks later, Bick’s supervisor got a call from one of Liberace’s agents. They wanted to fly Bick to Hollywood to be on The Liberace Show. They thought it would be significant: the highway patrolman who dared to ticket a star. Bick said he couldn’t say no. The department thought it was good publicity, and it was.

Years later, people still talk about it. Unknowingly, I worked with the man who once wrote Liberace’s brother a speeding ticket. Bick told me –––

“Liberace brought me out on stage. He announced that I was the highway patrolman who wrote his Brother George a speeding ticket!”